Joel Spolsky has probably saved a lot of people a lot of time by looking at some of the new online Web 2.0 calendar applications -- including 30 Boxes -- and finding that none of them meets his needs. He also has a believable theory about why so many are appearing now. He writes:
My theory is that about a year ago, there was a lot of buzz (possibly true, possibly false) about Google shipping a calendar, and everybody thought, oh gosh, it's gonna be really good, like Gmail, and then Yahoo! is going to be embarrassed again, and run out and buy the best Ajax calendar company they can find, just like they did with Oddpost, making those very funny kids millionaires overnight. So people aren't really building calendars to sell to people like me who need calendars: they're building calendar companies to sell to Yahoo!
But the whole idea of an online calendar is basically ridiculous, because the essence of the thing is that you need it with you, and you can't guarantee online access everywhere you go. Since around 1998, the best electronic solution has been to do your calendar in Microsoft Outlook and sync it with some form of portable device, and while I've done that, even I'm not convinced it's better than a paper diary. Often you just want to take your list of appointments and print it out -- and sometimes you mkight want to print from the online version.
We had a number of online calendars that worked pretty well five years ago, but none of them got enough users to thrive or (often) survive, and my pick of the bunch, Visto, went paid-for, leaving Yahoo as the line of least resistance.
If you want to do online calendaring better, there are three things you can do: (1) provide better sync with Outlook and with more types of device, plus make it easier to do; (2) offer good printing facilities from online calendars; and (3) improve the integration between the online calendar, conacts list, email, messaging and notes. (Yes, Yahoo, this means you!)
Prettying it up with an Ajaxing/Web 2.0 interface will no doubt amuse the geeks who hardly ever leave their desks, but is of little or no practical benefit to the people who might actually use the thing.
